Paper Detail
Qi Li, Bo Yin, Weiqi Huang, Ruhao Liu, Bojun Zou, Runpeng Yu, Jingwen Ye, Weihao Yu, Xinchao Wang
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a unified substrate for embodied intelligence. This shift raises a new class of safety challenges, stemming from the embodied nature of VLA systems, including irreversible physical consequences, a multimodal attack surface across vision, language, and state, real-time latency constraints on defense, error propagation over long-horizon trajectories, and vulnerabilities in the data supply chain. Yet the literature remains fragmented across robotic learning, adversarial machine learning, AI alignment, and autonomous systems safety. This survey provides a unified and up-to-date overview of safety in Vision-Language-Action models. We organize the field along two parallel timing axes, attack timing (training-time vs. inference-time and defense timing (training-time vs. inference-time, linking each class of threat to the stage at which it can be mitigated. We first define the scope of VLA safety, distinguishing it from text-only LLM safety and classical robotic safety, and review the foundations of VLA models, including architectures, training paradigms, and inference mechanisms. We then examine the literature through four lenses: Attacks, Defenses, Evaluation, and Deployment. We survey training-time threats such as data poisoning and backdoors, as well as inference-time attacks including adversarial patches, cross-modal perturbations, semantic jailbreaks, and freezing attacks. We review training-time and runtime defenses, analyze existing benchmarks and metrics, and discuss safety challenges across six deployment domains. Finally, we highlight key open problems, including certified robustness for embodied trajectories, physically realizable defenses, safety-aware training, unified runtime safety architectures, and standardized evaluation.
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@misc{li2026vision,
title = {Vision-Language-Action Safety: Threats, Challenges, Evaluations, and Mechanisms},
author = {Qi Li and Bo Yin and Weiqi Huang and Ruhao Liu and Bojun Zou and Runpeng Yu and Jingwen Ye and Weihao Yu and Xinchao Wang},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a unified substrate for embodied intelligence. This shift raises a new class of safety challenges, stemming from the embodied nature of VLA systems, including irreversible physical consequences, a multimodal attack surface across vision, language, and state, real-time latency constraints on defense, error propagation over long-horizon trajectories, and vulnerabilities in the data supply chain. Yet the literature remains fragmented across roboti},
url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.23775},
keywords = {Vision-Language-Action models, embodied intelligence, adversarial patches, cross-modal perturbations, semantic jailbreaks, freezing attacks, data poisoning, backdoors, certified robustness, safety-aware training, unified runtime safety architectures, code available, huggingface daily},
eprint = {2604.23775},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}